Daniel Murphy – a slippery solicitor with a low opinion of the police. He is more involved than anyone knows but usually manages to wriggle out of any unpleasant consequences.
Jerome Kelly – a financial advisor that could do with taking some proper advice.
Brendan and Cathal – two firemen from the Galway fire station.
Dr Julian Dodd – the slightly superior, but highly competent pathologist attached to the Galway police. Although he is sometimes hard to take, he has helped the Gardaí enormously with his thorough forensic knowledge.
McInerney – a very rough criminal from the Limerick area who is into drugs and money lending.
Professor Lattimer – a highly qualified forensic scientist from Leicester University who works with Dr Andrew Kerel on some fascinating new techniques to identify perpetrators of crime.
Sinéad – a member of the Garda Technical Bureau with a sense of humour which comes to the fore in the darkest situations.
Neville Watson – a bank manager with a bad attitude who is frightened of his Head Office and hides behind procedure at all costs.
Angela Byrne – a pretty girl with a number of aliases who spends her time travelling the world collecting and delivering items of evidence for the Gardaí.
MURDER
ON THE WEST COAST
DAVID PEARSON
Chapter One
Lorcan McFadden sat at a small, round, and badly stained table in the pub he called his local. The pub was largely empty with just one or two regulars seated at the bar. It smelled of stale beer, and the carpet was slick with years of spillage and God knows what else its patrons had brought in on their shoes. But it suited Lorcan and his girl well enough, and the drink was cheap.
Lorcan was a tall, skinny lad, with dark shoulder-length hair that fell onto the greasy collar of his anorak. He had a bony, angular face with narrow set eyes that gave him the appearance of a rat. His torn jeans added to the general impression of lack of care, although it was to some extent offset by the brand new expensive white trainers that adorned his otherwise bare feet.
Lorcan was nursing the dregs of a pint of Smithwicks, his second of the evening. It would be his last drink of the day, for Lorcan was stony broke.
Sheila, who had gone to the ladies, re-joined him and drained her own pint glass. The two were not exactly an item, but they spent a good deal of time together, and helped each other to earn a living from petty theft and occasional begging around the tourist spots in Galway city. It was the height of the summer, and the town was full of gullible tourists. Sheila was a pretty girl. Her high cheek bones and steely blue eyes coupled with her long fair hair gave her an aristocratic look that belied her modest background. Her size eight figure fitted neatly into her dark grey roll-neck pullover and blue denim jeans, which unlike Lorcan’s, were well kept.
Sheila had left home a year ago when her mother re-married after four years of being a widow. Her mother’s new man took more than a shine to his new step-daughter and had made it his business to catch her semi-naked in the bathroom or enter her room at inopportune times to bid her goodnight. She was smart enough to realize that this wasn’t going to end well, so she left home at seventeen and made her own way, such as it was, in the seedy margins with Galway’s other homeless people.
Her appearance was helpful to her endeavours as a beggar, and she usually managed to clock sixty or seventy euro in a day, while Lorcan kept watch for the ever-present Gardaí who would move them on, or worse still, if the Garda in question was having a bad day, book them for vagrancy.
They were about to leave the bar when a man that they had just recently met, and who had fenced some of their stolen gear, approached and sat down in between them on one of the empty stools.
“All right, Lorcan, Sheila?”
“Yeah, we’re good. Just about to leave actually,” Lorcan replied.
“Ah, bide a while won’t ye? Here, I’ll buy you a drink.” The man handed a twenty euro note to Sheila who wasted no time in heading to the bar with their empty glasses.
“Well, Lorcan, you drive a car if I remember rightly, don’t you?”
“Of course I do, but I haven’t any wheels just now. I’m a bit broke,” Lorcan replied.
“Right. Well I wonder if you and the girl might be interested in a little job I have out west in the next few days?” the man enquired. “I can fix you up with a car for the job – nothing fancy mind – but it will do.”
“Sure, as long as there’s a few bob in it,” Lorcan replied, trying not to show his eagerness too much. “I’ll be glad to be mobile again too.”
“Good man, well here’s the gig.”
Chapter Two
Senior Inspector Mick Hays was sitting at his desk in Mill Street Garda Station when his partner, Inspector Maureen Lyons came in with two mugs of hot coffee.
“What have you got there, Mick?” she said.
“These damn things have started to turn up again,” he said, holding up a twenty euro note.
“And they’re bloody good ones too. I thought we’d finished with this nonsense last year when we raided that house out on the Limerick road and found the printing press. But these are much higher quality. It wouldn’t have been detected at all except for the banknote counting machine that spat it out.”
“Where did they come from?” Lyons said.
“Oh, the usual. These two came from different pubs in the city when the landlord was doing the lodgement after the weekend, and I’m sure we’re not finished with them yet. I’ve put out a notification to all the pubs and restaurants to be sure to use their pens on all twenties, but you know yourself, when they are busy they don’t bother. Will you take Eamon out to the bars that these came from and see if there’s any CCTV, or if the barmen remember anything about who might have passed them?” Hays said.
“Yes sure, no problem. I never need much encouragement to go calling on pubs, as you know!” Lyons said.
* * *
The first one they called on was The Ostán, which was the Irish name for an inn and was reasonably easy to pronounce for the many visitors that frequented the place every day. It was right in the middle of Galway and enjoyed a vigorous trade. Like many of the pubs in the city it had been given a makeover at the end of the noughties and was now festooned with old books and kitchenalia dotted around on high shelves, with a good smattering of brass running the length of the long mahogany bar. Subdued lighting finished off the atmospherics in the place, and even at half past eleven in the morning, there were quite a few patrons enjoying the somewhat twee hospitality.
The two detectives approached the bar and introduced themselves discreetly, so as not to frighten the locals. After a brief discussion with the owner, a ruddy faced overweight man with thinning grey hair and an enormous beer belly, it was decided that there was no evidence to be collected about who might have exchanged the forged currency for drink at some stage over the previous weekend.
“I wouldn’t have said a word about it, only the bank made a fuss. It’s an occupational hazard in this job, although we haven’t seen much of it for the last few years to be honest,” the man said.
“That’s ‘cos we’re doing such a good job keeping it off the streets, sir,” Lyons said, tongue in cheek.
“Well you need to do a slightly better job just now, don’t you? I can’t afford many more of these things in my tills – it’s hard enough to make ends meet as it is,” he complained.
After a short discussion about crime prevention, and how the bar staff should be using the counterfeit detection pens on all twenties and larger denominations of notes, Lyons and Flynn left and went to the second hostelry on their itinerary.
Things went much the same there, although the manager was a good deal more helpful. This pub did have CCTV, but the cameras were trained on the tills, so that the proprietor could keep an eye on the bar staff, making sure that they rang up every drink sold and weren’t on the fiddle. He explained that the pub had enjoyed a really busy
weekend, and that it would be totally impossible to tell how the dud note got into the tills.
“It’s odd,” Lyons said to Flynn on the way back to the station. “If I was washing a dose of iffy notes, I’d buy each drink with a new one, to maximize the return of clean money, but this guy just seems to have been paying for his drink with them and leaving it at that. Very strange.”
* * *
It was just coming up to half past six in the evening and Hays and Lyons were getting ready to go home when the phone rang on Hays’ desk.
“This is Diarmuid at The Ostán, Inspector, I’ve just taken one of those forged twenties from a punter. He’s still here sipping a pint of beer in the lounge. Thought you might like to know,” he said.
“Thanks, yes of course, thanks very much. If he tries to leave before we get there, try to stall him. Offer him a free pint if you have to, but don’t let him get away!” Hays said.
Hays and Lyons decided to walk across town to The Ostán, given the time of night, as the traffic would be cruel, and they didn’t want to alert their suspect by using sirens. But as they walked along, Hays used his mobile phone to arrange for an unmarked Garda car to pull up outside the pub as soon as possible. It took them just eight minutes to make the journey, and by the time they got there, the unmarked Hyundai was parked outside on the double yellow lines.
Inside the pub, Hays asked for Diarmuid, who was one of three servers behind the bar. Diarmuid pointed out the customer who was alleged to have passed the dud note, and Hays and Lyons went over to him and sat beside him, one either side of the man.
“My name is Senior Inspector Mick Hays, and this is my colleague Inspector Maureen Lyons, sir,” Hays said in a quiet voice. “We’d like you to come nice and quietly with us to the Garda station for a wee chat. Please don’t make a scene, for your own sake.”
The customer feigned bewilderment, but seeing the cold stare in Hays’ eyes, decided to comply. They all went outside peacefully where the squad car was waiting to take them back to Mill Street.
* * *
In the interview room, the two detectives established that the man they were talking to was Eddie Turner, an English tourist over in the west for a few days to enjoy the scenery and the craic.
Eddie couldn’t explain how it was that he had come to pass a dodgy twenty euro note across the bar at The Ostán.
“I must have been given it in my change he said. I’m not used to this euro dosh, so I ain’t got a clue mate,” he protested.
Eddie kept up his story that he must have been given the forged currency in his change, or perhaps at the bureau in Dublin Airport. They questioned him for a further half hour, telling him that it was a serious matter passing forged currency, but could get no further with the story, so they decided to leave him for a while to think on his plight, while they went and made some further enquiries.
Fortunately, Sinéad Loughran was still working in the forensic lab attached to the station, and when Lyons called her, she was happy to come across to see if there were any forensic details on the notes that could link them to the man helping with enquiries. In the meantime, Hays had sent Detective Sergeant Eamon Flynn off to Eddie Turner’s hotel room to give it the once over and see if the man had a stash of more notes hidden away anywhere.
“It’s hopeless, sir. The notes have been handled a lot, and there’s nothing but smudges all over them. I’m sorry, but I’m not going to get any decent prints off any of this lot. Anyway, even if I could get a set of prints, that doesn’t prove that the man’s story isn’t true. I’m really sorry,” Sinéad said.
“OK, Sinéad, thanks for trying anyway. Can you take them away and see if you can find out anything more about them for us? You know, where the paper was made, anything relevant about the ink that was used – all the usual,” Hays said.
“Yes, of course, sir,” Sinéad said, picking up the notes and tucking them neatly into a plastic evidence bag.
“What do you reckon, boss?” Lyons said after the forensics girl had left.
“I don’t know Maureen. Give Eamon a call and see if he has come up with anything at the hotel. If not, we’ll have to let him go. Maybe we’ve put the wind up him enough to stop his little game anyway,” Hays said.
A few minutes later, Lyons was back in Hays’ office.
“Eamon got nothing, boss. The room is clean – well sort of. It’s not a very upmarket hotel, but Eddie just has a few clothes, toiletries, a map of County Galway and a copy of last week’s Daily Mirror, oh and a betting slip. You guessed it – €20 to win on a horse at Redcar with Paddy Power – but it didn’t,” she said.
“Didn’t what?”
“Didn’t win.”
“Oh right, so strictly speaking Paddy Power are not at any actual loss if Eddie used one of his homemade notes, so we needn’t worry about that then,” Hays said.
They had another interview with Eddie telling him that it was a serious matter, and they needed to know where he had got the forgeries, but he stuck rigidly to his story, and eventually they decided to release him for lack of evidence. They told him they were keeping his forged notes though, much to his disgust.
“I paid good sterling money for those, I’m out of pocket now,” he protested, but the Gardaí were having none of it and he was sent packing a poorer but a wiser man.
Chapter Three
It was late June in Connemara. It had been one of those unusual summers in the west of Ireland with a seemingly endless string of clear, sunny, warm days, just occasionally punctuated by one rainy day here and there, ‘just to remind us it can,’ as the locals would say.
The landscape looked truly magnificent in the bright sunshine, and the strong yellow gorse set against the backdrop of the blue of the mountains painted an unbelievably beautiful vista.
Tourists thronged the area in their hired cars and on bicycles, filling the hotels and hundreds of guest houses all along the Wild Atlantic Way. It was going to be a bumper season this year for sure.
Bernard Craigue, his wife Hannah and their twenty-year-old son, Jeremy, had spent an enjoyable day touring around the area in the comfort of Bernard’s navy-blue Jaguar. They had left their substantial bungalow overlooking the strand at Ballyconneely soon after ten o’clock in the morning and had driven out across the bog on the narrow undulating roads as far as Kylemore Abbey, starting out via Roundstone, and then turning left across country via Glynsk on the Leenaun road, so that they could enjoy more of the incredible scenery.
Bernard was fascinated by the history of the Abbey which came into being when the Benedictine nuns fled from Ypres in Belgium near the start of the First World War. He marvelled at the relics that the nuns had salvaged from their original home and was in awe of the work that they had completed, fully restoring the magnificent walled garden and grounds, and bringing the Abbey itself back to a serviceable, if not luxurious, state. While Bernard was immersing himself in the history of the place, Hannah spent time in the well-stocked gift shop. She bought several slightly tacky mementos to take back to her sister in London, who, in truth, already had quite enough cheap Chinese-made souvenirs of Connemara.
The Craigues had a good lunch at the café attached to the Abbey, and then made their way slowly back through Letterfrack and Clifden to their house in Ballyconneely.
Bernard had bought the house shortly after selling his printing business in north London for twelve million pounds a few years earlier. He had started working in the printing industry in the 1970s, soon after leaving school. He began as an apprentice, lugging quantities of paper and finished printed goods around, and cleaning down the machines at the end of the various print runs. When he had learnt his trade a few years later, he left the company he was with and set up his own very humble operation, initially working from a lock up garage near his rented home in Hendon. With very low overheads, and a modest loan from his family, he quickly grew the business, mostly by approaching clients of the firm he had left and undercutting their prices. By shaving signi
ficant amounts off his customers’ printing costs, Bernard’s company grew rapidly.
By the time Bernard sold the company, it had moved to an industrial estate behind Brent Cross Shopping Centre and employed forty-two people. The price he achieved reflected the value of the long-term contracts that Bernard had negotiated for the printing and distribution of popular women’s interest magazines. It was a lucrative trade. As Bernard himself was often known to say, ‘We don’t just print magazines, we print money!’
The house that the Craigues owned in Ballyconneely was one of the finest in the area. It had been built before Galway County Council had clamped down hard on the type of construction they would allow in Connemara. As a result, it was bigger and more contemporary than many others in the area. A massive feature window running the full width of the main lounge provided spectacular views out over Ballyconneely strand. As soon as Bernard and Hannah saw the house, they knew they had to have it, and probably paid quite a bit over the odds for it – but no matter, they said, it was unique.
Since buying the property, they spent two periods every year holidaying in their new home from home. The month of June, and the last three weeks of September were their favourite times, and Bernard would occasionally come over earlier in the year for a week on his own to check up on things and see to any small maintenance issues.
Jeremy, although being just twenty years old and hence having quite different interests to those of his parents, was happy to accompany them for the June vacation. He was doing Business Studies at London University, and once the end of year exams were over, he was glad to escape to the peace and tranquillity of the west of Ireland to relax and recharge his batteries.
Jeremy was a sociable chap. On most evenings he would ask his father to drive him into Clifden where he would meet up with other young folks on holiday in the area for a few pints and “the craic”. Clifden in high summer was jumping, with several of the many bars hosting live traditional music, and Jeremy usually made his way to King’s Bar at the top of the town where he was by this time quite well known. He enjoyed chatting to his new friends and they frequently made arrangements to meet the following day for a swim, or to take a boat out to one of the many small islands just off the coast.
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